An American in Cuba: The Life of Henry Reeve

The American abolitionist veteran who went to fight for Cuban independence and the abolition of slavery

Cuba has a long revolutionary tradition. 
 
Long before the socialist revolution of 1959 and even before the war of independence against Spain in the 1890s, Cuban progressives launched the Ten Years’ War of 1868-1878.
 
The Guerra Grande was Cuba’s first big go at republican independence from the Spanish empire, after some unsuccessful attempts to ally with Simón Bolívar earlier in the century. 
 
The uprising put the question of slavery on the table, too.
 
Along with Brazil and the United States, Spanish-ruled Cuba was one of the major slave societies in the Americas during the nineteenth century. Other states in the region had already abolished slavery by the 1860s.
 
The independence rebellion against Spain therefore created an opportunity for abolition in Cuba.

The republican leadership had little choice but to promise to abolish slavery, a surefire means of convincing thousands of enslaved Afro-Cuban workers to down tools and join the rebellion.
 
Meanwhile, in the nearby United States, slavery had just been destroyed in the Civil War. 
 
The Union victory in 1865 was followed by a moment of radical ‘Reconstruction’ in the South, a concerted effort to dismantle the racist, feudal social relations of that region and to empower Black freedmen with land and civil rights.
 
Many American radicals saw the Ten Years’ War in Cuba as an extension of their own struggle to end slavery.
 
These radicals urged President Ulysses S. Grant to intervene on behalf of the anticolonial rebels. But he wouldn’t budge. 
 
Several Americans even travelled to Cuba to take part in the fighting themselves. 
 
And one of them was Henry Reeve Carroll, an Irish American born on this day in 1850 in Brooklyn. 

Reeve served in the Cuban rebel army, rising all the way to the rank of Brigadier General, before he died in the fighting.
 
Although still just a teenager when he sailed to Cuba in 1869, Reeve was already a war veteran. He’d been a drummer boy in the Union Army during the Civil War. 
 
That experience had made him a convinced opponent of slavery, and his Irish heritage meant he was ill-disposed to colonialism, too.
 
Driven by these motives, Reeve volunteered to fight for abolition and independence in Cuba.
 
Thanks to his military experience and battlefield courage, Reeve made a quick rise through the ranks of the Cuban army, leading from the front and suffering repeated injuries.
 
Throughout the war in Cuba, Reeve served in his ‘Union blue’ U.S. Army uniform from the Civil War – it was the same struggle for freedom in his eyes.
 
The Cubans hailed Reeve as El Inglesito – the little Englishman – which he might not have appreciated as an American and an Irishman, but they meant well. 

By 1873, Reeve had been promoted to the head of cavalry for an entire Cuban division. 
 
But his luck ran out in 1876, when he was cornered by Spanish forces.
 
The colonial troops had become more brutal in their methods, frequently torturing and executing prisoners, so Reeve took his own life to avoid capture.
 
A couple of years later, the Ten Years’ War ended with compromise. Spain retained control of Cuba (for now) but slavery began to be abolished on the island.
 
Meanwhile, Reeve was immortalised as a symbol of international solidarity with the Cuban revolution.
 
In this sense, he seems anomalous in the context of Cuban-U.S. relations. 
 
Since the 1890s, most U.S. interventions in Cuba have been intended not to support but to limit or undermine its people’s sovereignty.
 
Twenty years after Reeve’s death, the U.S. government intervened in the Cuban War of Independence to make sure that the new republic fell into the American sphere of influence rather than self-determination proper. 
 
Henry Reeve – army veteran, radical abolitionist, internationalist – represents an alternative form of U.S. foreign policy based on republican solidarity and fraternity rather than coercion and fear.